Coachella

It's not about the music, it's about the hang.

Name one band that's broken from Coachella, I DARE YOU!

Want to take lessons from Coachella?

Here they are:

1. Be on the cutting edge. The reason Coachella is the granddaddy of U.S. festivals is because it was first. Its promoters took a risk. Want to succeed in today's world? Take chances! Only one problem, if you take the road less travelled, you're gonna hit roadblocks. Even the audience may not be up to speed. Yes, it took years for Coachella's audience to catch up with it. And now it's running on that good will, especially this year, with lame headliners that wouldn't draw this crowd anywhere else. Also, unlike Bonnaroo, Coachella didn't try to recreate Woodstock. Very few people like to camp in the mud. Provide that option, but don't emphasize it. You want to stay in a hotel or condo, very few like to rough it. And Coachella/Palm Springs has a built-in lodging infrastructure. Give ultimate credit to the refashioned Lollapalooza, which realized that you could bring the mountain to Mohammed, instead of forcing everybody to jet to the middle of nowhere, you could get them to come to you. Lollapalooza also succeeded by plunking itself in an underserved market. People love the coasts and ignore the heartland, where the people are just as hip as they are by the ocean, as a result of the Internet and cable TV.

2. Image is more important than reality. Sound bleed at Coachella is horrific. The art and amusement park rides are a secondary sideshow, minimal at best. If you keep saying you've got the best site, others repeat and believe it. Yes, Coachella is surrounded by mountains, you've got clean air, but if you think this is the perfect concert site and installation, you've never been anywhere else.

3. It's a Gen-Y world. Booking the Stone Roses as a headliner is like taking your grandma to see Swedish House Mafia. Huh? The band broke twenty plus years ago and never really made it in America. Curation? Give the people what they want, which is dance music. The nods to rock and other musical genres other than EDM at Coachella are completely superfluous. The attendees don't care. And who are those attendees? College age and just graduating hipsters. And if you think they go for the music, then you don't realize the event can sell out without any talent being announced. The same rule always applies, brand names mean something. Unfortunately, the Coachella impresarios don't realize that it's been in excess of a decade since the festival began and the generations have changed. You can get away with classic rock and classic hip-hop, stuff everybody knows, but whatever was big on MTV, whatever was hip in the U.K. but never made it here, is completely irrelevant. I know, I know, it's scary. To think that thirty years of musical history has been wiped off the map. That almost everything between 1975 and 2005 is irrelevant. But that's the truth. to think otherwise is to live in a pre-computer, pre-smartphone era. Things change, you've got to own them. This is a generation that loves to network, that has been taught that music is secondary, not primary. That their little lives are all that matter. Hell, want to have big success at your festival? Hold a karaoke contest! Don't forget, this is the generation that grew up on Guitar Hero!

4. V.I.P. is for oldsters. This is the genius of Coachella's pricing. Oldsters want to believe they're better than everybody else, it's the boomer ethos. Put them behind a velvet rope and you've made their day. Grandpa and grandma don't want to hang with the great unwashed, but tell the kids on the field that they can go to spring break in Cancun and they say WHERE DO I SIGN UP! The girls will lift their tops and the boys will smoke their blunts and if you didn't come of age during the sexting era, you'll be both titillated and horrified. We had to go to the movies to experience nudity, today's kids not only have the web, they have friends with benefits who are willing to play doctor way past the age of puberty. If you don't think you've been left behind, if you don't lament your age, then you're asexual.

5. Don't believe anything you read about Coachella. A movie could possibly capture it. But no one writing for a newspaper or magazine gets it. It's not about the music! It's not about who was good and bad, it's about the AUDIENCE! The girl who was too high and kept falling down while dancing... It's about the stories, not the tunes, months later telling all your buds what you saw. If you think it's about saying how good x or y band was, unless it was a deejay, you grew up in the Fillmore and don't understand today's culture whatsoever. Coachella is where you drive your own car (hell, did Daddy buy you your own automobile in the sixties, OF COURSE NOT!), to a pre-approved place where your parents have no idea what's going on. It's like summer camp without counselors. Where you spread your wings and fly for the very first time. Come on, who other than youngsters wants to walk around in ninety plus degree heat with no shade other than in tents where you're so close to other people you can smell their b.o?

6. It's business. Appear if you get paid a lot and you want the publicity. Of if they're making you a headliner before your time. Your performance is gonna do nothing for your career.

7. Exclusives don't matter. Coachella is so busy protecting the brand, but they're clueless as to what the brand is! It's not the right to see exclusive performers, it's the right to hang at an exclusive event that happens just twice a year!

8. Institutions. Think about it, MTV is history. Even record labels are irrelevant. As for regular concerts, other than the classic acts, they depend upon who's hot today, and they're oftentimes gone tomorrow. Coachella IS the new institution, but it's more than what once was. It's the promoter, the label and the tour guide all at once. And the fact that it grew slowly only strengthens its imprimatur and adds to its longevity, as does the out of the way location. That Jay-Z festival in Philadelphia? Huh? Where's the exclusivity, where's the gravitas? That Rothbury festival had it right, the only problem was the promoters didn't continue to stick it out. If you're not willing to lose money, don't get into the festival business.

9. You never want to rely on the acts. Coachella's strength is its checkbook. It can buy the biggest talent year after year. This is a huge change from the past, wherein the promoter was a second class citizen. He with the biggest bank book wins. And since you're only buying talent for two weekends, you don't have to kiss butt to fill holes in your schedule. And for every agent who wants to say no, at home he realizes he can horse trade and get his other acts on the bill by agreeing to provide the headliner. It's pure commerce, music has got nothing to do with it!

10. You only have to go once. Well, every three or four years or so you have to check in, to follow the trends. Who headlined two years ago? I dare you to answer! But what we've seen is the dance tent has slowly gained traction and is now burgeoning. Coachella is the father of big time EDM in the U.S., I don't know why they don't embrace it. I think the idea of two weekends of the same acts is ridiculous, it only makes sense on a monetary level. Everyone knows the first weekend is the one that counts. Want to blow people's minds? Make the second weekend all EDM! Tickets will sell even faster, that will prove where the power is. As for worrying about sacrificing the farm, abandoning the old acts and ending up a loser, this is exactly what hobbled the labels. If you've got one foot in the past, you're not gonna last in the future. If EDM peaks and dies, you book what happens next.

11. Keep slots open for what's happening right now. Yup, solidifying your bill eons in advance leaves you looking out of the loop. Now, more than ever, acts come and go and are then done. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis needed to be at Coachella. The promoters have to get off their high horse. They think they're a museum, but what they don't realize is they're offering a smorgasbord, a veritable buffet of what's current. That's why the old acts don't matter. I should be able to leave Coachella and say I saw everything that's happening right now, along with some boobies...


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